We get The Amazing Spider-Man 2 on the big screen this week, with all that excellent spidey action and banter we have come to expect. He gets a couple of super villains to defeat this time around, and begins to suspect they have something in common. This 5th venture into the Spiderman franchise looks like it is going to be quite the fun ride. Bad Johnson is a comedic fantasy in which a mans penis leaves his body and takes on human form. As you might expect, that one is in limited release. In even more limited release is Protector 2, original title Tom Yum Goong 2, another elephant training martial arts series from Thailand. Thai martial arts are a bit different than the Chinese and Japanese forms we are all familiar with, and this film stars Tony Jaa of Ong-Bak fame. His parents are elephant trainers, which explains why the animals are in so many of his films.
DreamWorks Animation just posted the first five minutes of How To Train Your Dragon 2, so I figured I would share it here. Enjoy.
There are two choices that could be fun this weekend; The Machine is about two engineers working to create an autonomous AI to help mankind (and specifically one scientist’s daughter). That lasts until the Ministry of Defense steps in, takes the AI operated robot over, and teaches it to kill. As you know, this is not the thing to do if you hope to survive the rise of our evil robot overlords. The other film worth noting is Brick Mansions, about a cop and an ex-con trying to keep Detroit from being destroyed by the criminal gangs running wild behind the containment walls erected to keep them imprisoned. If this Luc Besson film plot line sounds familiar, it is because he is remaking his own 2004 movie Banlieue 13 (District B13), but not in French and not in Paris this time. For those thinking this is not genre, this is the future we do not want to live in, somewhere between Escape From New York and Mad Max. The original movie introduced the world to parkour, something most folks had never even heard of at that time.
We get a few choices this time, the first of them looks like the most interesting. Transcendence is about a dying scientist who downloads his mind into a computer, with results that are not quite what he expected. This is a tale of one way the Singularity might manifest itself, and not necessarily one of the better ways for that to come about. Since this one has Johnny Depp, I am also expecting it to be the quirkiest selection for the week end. If you are looking for something a little more light-hearted, Antboy is a Danish production about a 12 year old superhero who has just run into his first major bad guy.
Animated fun this time around with Rio 2, from the folks who brought us the Ice Age series. Our happy blue couple think they are the last of their species, but then others like themselves are spotted in the Amazon. There is nothing for it but to pack up their three kids and go find out who else might have survived, and whether they will end up having a future together. But Blu should have worried more about the past, as he discovers he now has a father in law… and a long lost romantic rival he never knew existed.
Besides the silliness and great characters this production house excels at, I expect they may also throw in a selection of samba driven music to fuel the soundtrack, as they did the first time around. The musical pieces they did in the original film allowed them to showcase some quite complex and well choreographed dance animations that were absolutely amazing to watch, especially in 3D. I look forward to seeing at least one such sequence in the sequel, although I can’t imagine what they could do to top their initial offering.
There have been a number of trailers released for Lucy, the new Luc Besson science fiction film starring Scarlett Johansson and Morgan Freeman, but I like this one the best. It should be on the big screen around August 8th or so.